As an ICT student or professional, you need to solve all kind of ICT challenges. Answering the questions and tackling the problems or opportunities of your ICT project requires research and often a combination of various ICT research methods. The toolkit on this website offers you a set of possible research methods and a framework to select the appropriate (combination of) methods.
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Why?
With many eyeballs on the code, all bugs are shallow. Colleagues can help you find bugs and improve the quality of your source code.
Why?
Find out if what you are planning to do has already been done (in full or in part) by someone else.
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Map the domain that your product will be part of, so you know the key concepts and the relations between them.
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Find something interesting in the data, check understanding of the domain or problem space, generate new questions based on the data.
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Get a detailed view of how users will be using your solution and what their requirements are.
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A focus group discussion is an efficient way to gain insight into how people think about an issue, without having to interview each person separately.
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Learn from potential users of your new product and other stakeholders
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Get a feeling for how your intended users will use your product by unobtrusively observing them in their natural environment, doing the things they always do.
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Before solving a problem, it is important to understand it. Moreover, problem analysis ensures that you are not solving the wrong problem.
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Identify the stakeholders and ensure that their needs are considered.
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Collect information (mostly quantitative) from a large sample of your target group
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Understand the structure, flow or other aspects of a certain task. Task analysis focuses on what end users actually do to achieve their goals.
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Find out if what you are planning to do has already been done (in full or in part) by someone else.
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Test a subsystem or component in isolation to ensure its correctness before integrating it with other components or modules.
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Computer simulations are used when a real-world process, system or event situation is not available or feasible.
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Gain insights by measuring and analysing data. Researching a dataset can give you useful quantitative information about the topic of interest.
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Ensure that the data you are using is of sufficient quality to base further conclusions on.
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Hardware does not always perform according to its specifications. Hardware validation ensures that the hardware performs as expected and excludes hardware as a source of errors.
Why?
Verify the correctness and usefulness of the results of your model with the stakeholders or compare different models with respect to their usefulness.
Why?
Ensure that your model produces results of sufficient quality to base your conclusions on.
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Test the operating conditions under which the system delivers its intended functions.
Why?
Understand the security risks of an IT system.
Why?
Solve problems before your system goes into production and demonstrate that the system operates according to its requirements.
Why?
Find certain types of bugs as early as possible and ensure your code keeps running after a change.
Why?
Detect problems users have with your solution and correct them before the system goes live.
Why?
Find out if what you are planning to do has already been done (in full or in part) by someone else.
Why?
Incorporating what has proven to work somewhere else forms the basis of any high-quality project.
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Find a niche or unique selling point competitors are not filling.
Why?
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With many eyeballs on the code, all bugs are shallow. Colleagues can help you find bugs and improve the quality of your source code.
Why?
Norms and values differ between various people and societies. Make sure your design and development decisions do not lead to conflicts with certain norms and values.
Why?
Conforming to guidelines and standards helps ensure the credibility of the quality of your product and prevents reliability, privacy and security issues.
Why?
Colleagues and experts can help improve your work, especially if they need to reuse it.
Why?
Get an idea of the unique selling points of the opportunity you have found, or of the idea you have to tackle a problem, and practice concise communication about them.
Why?
Ensure that the product is perfect before it is released to the client or users.
Why?
Get an impression of how well your code is written and quickly find vulnerabilities, weak spots and bad smells.
Why?
With many eyeballs on the code, all bugs are shallow. Colleagues can help you find bugs and improve the quality of your source code.
Why?
Maximize the outcome of your efforts or investment.
Why?
To gain inspiration from your users by involving them in the development process.
Why?
With many eyeballs on the code, all bugs are shallow. Colleagues can help you find bugs and improve the quality of your source code.
Why?
Breaking a complex IT system or problem into smaller parts ensures its maintainability and robustness, and facilitates cooperation in large-scale software projects.
Why?
Compare an actual situation to an ideal or desired situation. The gap analysis can be used to create plans to bridge the gaps.
Why?
To find new solutions, be able to try them out quickly and involve many people in your challenge.
Why?
Defining the IT architecture is complex and requires contributions from and interactions between software designers and/or architects. Sketching facilitates these discussions.
Why?
Improve the quality of complex decisions
Why?
Develop, evaluate or communicate a concept, design or problem solution to make your ideas concrete, to learn whether they work and to discover the technical limitations or possibilities.
Why?
To define and weigh the requirements of a new design or redesign, considering the interest of all concerned stakeholders.
Why?
Understand why a problem occurs and prevent it from happening again.
